The speaker suggests that if consciousness is an artifact of the brain’s effort to support complex intelligence, a computer might not need consciousness and could develop a more clever and elegant alternative.

“So your brain is limited to the way in which it works. And so if it turns out that our own consciousness is an artifact of our brain trying to make complicated intelligent stuff work, and, uh, the computer does not need the same artifact, it could be that the computer comes up with something that is more, um, clever and more elegant than our own consciousness.”